Although the roots of my writing are obvious in retrospect, I fell in and out of the craft during the next six years. I didn't work for the Central High yearbook or school newspaper staff. I never took typing lessons or owned a typewriter while I was a student. I tried my hand at some teenage poetry, which could have got me expelled if I had circulated it (text here). It's a wonder I followed the Muse at all.

I switched majors three times in college, starting out in mathematics, drifting into philosophy for a semester, then finally settling on English Composition in my third year. I also picked up math again as a double major, because I had already accumulated most the credits I needed, and I had a growing interest in computers. Some think it strange that I mixed words and numbers this way, yet I've always considered math to be a language and my love of digitry often shows up in my writing. Binary numbers, for example, play a major role in the structure of The Last Book.

During my last two years at DePauw University, a silver-haired expository-writing teacher named Elizabeth Christman encouraged me to follow my Muse. Two of my Sigma Nu brothers were also majoring in English, so we turned a section of the fraternity dining hall into an area we called the Romper Room. There, we would tap away on Smith-Coronas till the wee hours of the morning, downing coffee from a huge pot, tossing wadded up drafts into a cardboard box in the middle of the room, and pasting copies of our rejection letters on the walls that surrounded us. We had negative replies from dozens of magazines, including Playboy and the New Yorker, Esquire and the Atlantic. One of my favorites was from a newspaper with the slogan "All the News That's Fit to Print." Rejection from them meant a lot.

In 1972, I completed my first book-length manuscript, A Backpacker's Guide to the Island of Crete, written as an independent study project while I was attending the Hellenic-American Institute for half a year in Greece. It was never published in its entirety, but the section about Samaria Gorge was later accepted by the Chicago Tribune for their Sunday travel supplement, which became my first byline. From there I went on to publish hundreds of feature articles and win several awards for my fiction. Most recently, I've published a book about the history of Las Vegas.